Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

Laura Marsh

Home Invasions

In John Lanchester’s novel Look What You Made Me Do, a couple’s private language is weaponized against them.

August 20, 2026 issue

Anahid Nersessian

Refusing to Look Away

In Killing Spree, the poet Jorie Graham pursues an essentially ethical impulse to find a true language for the evil in the world.

August 20, 2026 issue

Deborah Eisenberg

Out of the Rubble

In novels written immediately after World War II, Wolfgang Koeppen mined the conscience of Germany.

August 20, 2026 issue

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

Climate and Punishment

Vigil finds George Saunders returning to the theme of his first novel, grief—this time not for a person but for a planet.

July 23, 2026 issue

Susan Rubin Suleiman

On the Precipice

Critics who call André Breton’s Nadja a novel miss its most innovative aspects.

July 23, 2026 issue

Joe Dunthorne

When the Rents Were Low

An oral history of the New York School poets suggests how its successive cohorts have changed over the years.

June 25, 2026 issue

Gary Saul Morson

Reassembling Bakhtin

Since Mikhail Bakhtin became widely known in the 1980s, his book on Rabelais has perplexed readers for its seemingly contradictory stance to everything else he wrote.

June 25, 2026 issue

Adam Kirsch

The Siren Song of Illness

In writing The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann struggled to free himself from his artistic preoccupation with sickness and death.

June 25, 2026 issue

Errata, Typos, and Goofs

Evan Kindley

To Err Is Poetic

The poetry canon is dotted with mistakes large and small; why do some critics seem attached to reading these errors as intentional?

February 11, 2021 issue

Daniel Drake

Proofreading the President

Mocking the president’s twisting circumlocutions on Twitter is cold consolation—ask anyone who bought a “Bushisms” calendar the January before the United States invaded Iraq.

October 8, 2019

John Kidd

The Scandal of ‘Ulysses’

“Ulysses: The Corrected Text is not a purified text, but a different version from what Joyce conceived, authorized, and saw into print.”

June 30, 1988 issue

Vladimir Nabokov

On Translating Pushkin Pounding the Clavichord

An infelicitous translation of Eugene Onegin from a pitiless and irresponsible paraphrast bristles with crippled clichés and mongrel idioms, an inadequate knowledge of English and wobbly Russian.

April 30, 1964 issue

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007)

Elizabeth Hardwick

A selection of Elizabeth Hardwick’s contributions to the New York Review. Read all of her essays here.